Under load, around 65C

And that's actually quite nice on air so please disregard my post raising the temp issue. It would not have affected fps anyway, unless your CPU would 'throttle' due overheating, which it does not at 65C.

 

Did you post your render settings somewhere so that the folks could suggest small (and perhaps significant) changes to help a bit with fps? Since you are running good hardware already, not much will come out of investing hundreds of bucks to gain small percentages, so the settings seem like a viable and cheap path.

 

Stating this because, once you run into CPU limitations, the solutions incorporating stronger GPUs don't help and the ones needing you to buy a new board, CPU and RAM don't yield as much when you are already running a somehow current 4670K. FloB's link showed that there are gains of course but only small ones in relation to the money invested.

 

Long story short, settings screenshots might help. :smile:

How do I screenshot the settings page? 

Assuming you are on Windows: http://www.wikihow.com/Take-a-Screenshot-in-Microsoft-Windows

 

Next question will be how you can post it here, which could happen by attaching the pictures (perhaps crop+resize them first) or by uploading them to an image hosting service (most are free) and then posting the links here.

It depends. A faster GPU won't help with things that are CPU related (mostly: objects, cars, water reflections, draw distance). But you could crank up shadows, AA, texture resolution, run a 4k screen...). You can't trade one for the other.

 

This is an important point in this discussion.  Across all the different settings available in XP, some of them are very CPU dependent, and some are very GPU dependent.  A killer GPU won't help one bit with the stuff that's CPU dependent.  When I said I can crank up my settings because of my very good GPU, I am definitely referring to those settings that rely on my GPU.  For example, I can run 8xSSAA @ 2560x1440 with no issues, but when I try to run objects, roads and trees all on maximum, even with no AA, my GPU isn't able to help, and I can see my frame rates suffer.

 

It's been my observation that there are a few things that are interconnected, such as shadows. They seem to be tied to both the GPU and CPU, despite the 'melt your GPU' description.  Turning on global shadows when objects and trees are set at higher levels (and a dense urban setting) gives me a performance penalty even at the lowest settings.  Setting the global shadows to 'melt your GPU', however, only increases my GPU workload a bit over the lowest settings, and doesn't affect the my frame rates at all.

 

So I guess the argument can be made for having a well rounded system.  You aren't going to get stellar performance from just a good GPU or just a good CPU, you need both.